Sealing the deal

This article in the New Statesman is about as fine an example of wishful thinking as you could hope to see.  Without going too deeply into it, it displays the traditional tropes of its kind: Tory support is shallow, an economic revival would put Labour back in the box seat for victory, the Tories aren’t achieving the same polling leads as New Labour were – that sort of thing.

Well, good luck to them.  Whistling in the dark has a fine pedigree.  But the problem for Labour is that Tory weaknesses are all but irrelevant.  Macintyre is quite right that the Tory vote share in the European elections was less than that achieved by William Hague.  But it is the Labour vote share that is more interesting.  If Macintyre is after historical comparisons, how about this: in the 1994 European elections, the Conservatives polled 28% - getting on for twice as much as Labour in 2009.

I rather suspect that we will be still be reading articles about how the Tories have yet to ‘seal the deal’ with the British people when Boris Johnson is running for his second term as Prime Minister.